Editorial: Thumbs up, thumbs down

Published 8:21 am, Tuesday, July 21, 2015

Thumbs up to the Bridgeport Police Department’s gun buyback program, but Thumbs Down to the lack of allocated funds. Inner-city gun buyback efforts have repercussions for everyone in the state — not the least of which is the cost to taxpayers for the prosecution and incarceration of a suspect after a homicide is committed. On Saturday, the Bridgeport buyback program, open to residents and nonresidents alike, had to turn away 20 gun owners after buyback funds ran out.

Thumbs down to the state’s minimum pricing rules which Michael Berkoff, CEO of the regional liquor store chain BevMax, has criticized as needlessly costing consumers too much when they buy alcoholic beverages. It’s called the Liquor Control Act and it’s one of the last remnants of Connecticut’s Blue laws. It states that liquor retailers must sell beer, wine and liquor at a minimum amount above what they pay for the goods at the wholesale level. This is a cumbersome tool to control alcohol sales. It would be far more efficacious to expand efforts on preventing the sale of alcohol to minors and to intoxicated customers at bars and restaurants.

Thumbs up to Evan Connors, the Greenwich High School transgender teenager who endured one obstacle after another in his long, sometimes painful journey from female to male. Those who research the brain, such as Stanford University’s Robert Sapolsky, tell us that a transgender individual is quite literally born with the brain of the opposite sex. But getting some of his friends and peers on board with that idea has been and will continue to be daunting for Evan. Still, we were encouraged that GHS allowed him to get his diploma in a red cap and gown — the color assigned to boys.

Thumbs down to 46-year-old Hiroko Kurihara, of Norwalk, who was charged by police last week with two counts of risk of injury to a minor and two counts of leaving an unattended child in a car. Kurihara allegedly twice left the 4-month old infant alone in a car in the parking lot of a gym while she exercised. The first time was in the morning, the second time around noon. The second time, fortunately, a passer-by responded to the child’s cries, searched the cars until she found the infant and called police. Officials at every level have urged people to be careful with children — even pets — in enclosed cars in the summer, particularly in light of the horrible death of a 15-month-old Ridgefield boy last summer after his father inadvertently left him in a car.

Thumbs down what we and others see as a lack of urgency in implementing Positive Train Control technology for the Northeast Corridor. PTC can automatically slow down trains approaching dangerous stretches of track and the system could likely have prevented 30 accidents in the last 11 years. The latest impediment has been the Federal Communications Commission, which hasn’t seemed too concerned with allocating needed radio frequencies along the corridor.